1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for separating lipids from solutions of animal or vegetable sources.
2. Description of Prior Art
Separation and isolation constitute a unit in most separation methods in biology, nutrition, and medicine. Biological material is treated for the purpose of subsequent enrichment, separation or isolation of individual substances or groups of substances or compartments.
The isolation of substances from the most diverse biological materials, liquids, and solutions has been a long-standing practice. Both unambiguous characterization and use in various fields such as nutrition, pharmacy or medicine, for example, in most cases require the chemically uniform compound, i.e. the pure substance, or composition deleted from certain substances. Within the entire life science sector, therefore, separation methods represent one of the most important foundations for the identification of substances and their use. Said isolation or separation often constitutes a problem, depending on the specific isolation task, for example regarding the purity of the substance to be isolated.
The isolation or separation of biological material, for example organisms, tissues, biological cells, organelles, micelles, viruses etc., as a rule generally constitutes the first step in the analysis or extraction of cell constituents. Such constituents can, for example, be nucleic acids, proteins, metabolites, pigments, lipids etc. As the quality of all subsequent steps is determined by the treatment, such as disintegration, of the biological material, this process occupies a key position. Novel methods are therefore of interest for a multiplicity of procedures and have a proportionately large potential for being marketed profitably as a product. Denaturation seems a prerequisite, in the same way as explained above for the separation methods, for life science fields or nutrition. Methods of denaturating biological material are not universal, but are geared very specifically to the particular requirements. The known methods—mechanical and non-mechanical denaturation methods—are toxic, expensive, time-consuming and laborious, as well as being limited to specific applications. Moreover, there is a high risk of cross-contamination which has a major impact on the quality of all subsequent process steps, especially in sensitive separation methods. With the known mechanical methods, moreover, standardization and automation is more difficult, or it is virtually impossible to combine them with separation and isolation methods.
The standard separation and isolation methods generally include filtration, centrifuging, crystallization, distillation, extraction, electrophoresis, chromatography and magnetism-based methods.
A precipitate with different levels of lipids and β-lactoglobulin (lipids/proteins ratio of 0.60) can be then obtained. In order to improve whey protein fractionation techniques, other processes to remove residual fats were proposed, but the yield are still without significant satisfaction.
Considering the state of the art mentioned above, there is still needs of method for new innovation for separation of lipids from biological solutions or liquid compositions.